Read
the captions by hovering over the images, and click on them to
see them enlarged.

St
Martin, Thompson

St Martin is a favourite church of my friend
Tom Muckley, companion on some of my Norfolk forays, and
since our tastes often coincide I was confident of liking
this one too. I wasn't disappointed; after the lockout at
nearby prissy Merton, this was a proper
church; open, firmly seated in an ancient space and
properly lord of all around.

In 1349,
coincident with, and possibly in response to, the Black
Death, a college of Priests was founded at Thompson by
the Shardlows to pray for their souls. Much of the
rebuilding and refurbishing of the church from then until
the Reformation of the 1530s was a response to that
foundation. That this is a collegiate church is revealed
by the fittings in the chancel, but one of the later
Shardlows thought himself needy enough of prayer to build
a separate chantry chapel at the east end of the south
aisle in the mid-15th century. But even this is
understated, and barely extends two metres southwards of
the aisle wall. The tower is reminiscent of nearby Tottington, now abandoned,
although it put Pevsner so in mind of other neighbours
Ashill and Caston that he is sure they're by the same
mason. In general, I thought the tower probably predated
the college, as does the aisless, clerestoryless nave.

That so
much has survived in here is thanks to that most contrary
of guardians, neglect. Since the Reformation Thompson has
shared a minister with its more important neighbour Merton, beside the Hall.
The Victorian Lord Walsinghams set their busy artisans to
work there, and let this one be. There was a polite
reordering just before the First World War, but that is
all. And so, the woodwork is silvery and ancient, having
escaped the varnishing the 19th century lavished
elsewhere. Uneven floors balance the gorgeous screen, and
the nave is full of quirky little details: the benches,
installed on the eve of the Civil War and dated as such,
perhaps by puritans to increase the capacity of the
building for long sermons, and an intriguing structure
for those sermons to be delivered from. This is a three
decker pulpit of sorts, but cobbled together from bits
and pieces found elsewhere in the church. The pulpit
itself is a wineglass shape, possibly pre-Reformation;
the adjoining minister's stall and lectern is a modified
panelled pew. The clerk's desk appears to be part of a
stall, and was possibly added later. For several
centuries, it was this structure, and not the altar, that
provided the focus for the worshippers of Thompson.

But
perhaps it wasn't puritans who did it, because wholly
contemporary with all this is a superb surviving set of
Jacobean altar rails, installed here at the behest of
Archbishop of Canterbury WIlliam Laud in 1630. These are
worth more than a passing glance, if only to take in
their significant place in English history. Every church
had to have them, accompanied by a raised step if
possible, and the holy table was to be removed from the
nave and placed lengthways within the rails against the
east wall. The uprights of the rails are placed at
regular intervals, obstensibly to keep dogs out of the
sanctuary. In fact, English churches did not have altar
rails before the Reformation, but such a blatantly
Catholic practice as defending the altar was anathema to
the puritans, and increased to fever pitch the struggle
to control the national Church. There was a lot of
resistance to Laud's demands at parish level,
particularly in East Anglia, and once the Civil War was
underway the Parliamentarian troops were charged with the
task of entering churches they passed to remove the altar
rails and burn them. Laud was captured, charged with
treason, and beheaded. In Suffolk and Cambridgeshire, the
iconoclast William Dowsing was commissioned to travel the
county ensuring that steps had been lowered and altar
rails removed, and we may assume that something similar
happened in Norfolk. So they are a real survival.

These 17th
century fittings are exciting, then, but it is the
medieval survivals that inspire awe. The screen is a
rustic delight, stencilled with flowers, and its shafts,
as Mortlock observes, turned like barbers'
poles. Behind it in the chancel are the college stalls
with some of their misericord seats carved underneath,
including one of a rather serious Bishop. Less serious,
more mysterious, are the green men who peer out from the
spandrels of the wonderful sedilia - you can see my favourite below.

Wall
paintings survive, though so fragmentary that it is hard
to make anything out - apart from a couple of
post-Reformation texts, installed there by the
Elizabethan church in its attempts to turn us all into
serious-minded protestants. What a battleground this
church has been!